Hurrying to the Rescue
“It was at 3.30 in the afternoon that K-13 came to rest upon the bottom of the Gareloch, and the short winter’s day in the North was drawing towards sunset. As soon as the commander of the E-boat had marked the spot where K-13 lay, he pressed at full speed for Greenock, flashing as he went aerial signals to the Senior Naval Officer in Glasgow. A salvage steamer, which was lying at Greenock, went off at once and picked up two hoppers and two tugs as consorts. Telegrams were dispatched to Fairfields and to Glasgow, and the news spread quickly through those circles whose business it is to be well informed. Not a moment was lost by those upon whose shoulders rested the responsibility of the salvage operations. By the early hours of Tuesday, long before daylight, a fleet of seven vessels had collected at the spot below which, seventy feet down, K-13 rested motionless in the mud. There were the Greenock salvage steamer, the two tugs, the two hoppers, and two E-boats. With them, in charge of everything and responsible for everything, was the S. N. O., Captain (now Rear-Admiral) Brian Barttelot, and with him was his naval assistant, Captain Corbett.
“The problem before the salvors bristled with novel difficulties. In peace and war we had lost many submarines, but never had a live man been taken out of one which had sunk. Barttelot was limited by what was mechanically possible. He had not—as I confess now that I had when composing ‘The Last of the Grenvillas’—the guiding light of a precedent. First he had to get into continuous communication with the survivors of K-13’s company, for without their coöperation he was helpless to aid them. Then he had to devise a rapid and effective means to supply them with air and food for a period which might stretch into days. And, lastly, he had to get them out. That was the worst of his problems—how to get them out. For remember K-13 was a great bulky double-skinned lump of a vessel of two thousand solid tons and of more than three hundred feet in length. She was not the kind of craft which could easily be raised.
“But although Barttelot’s difficulties were great his advantages were greater. He had nothing to fear from bad weather—the Gareloch is narrow and well sheltered. He had within reach the incalculable resources of the biggest shipbuilding center in the world. And there in Glasgow he had, too, just round the corner, the builders of K-13, who knew the work of their own hands as a man knows the picture which he has painted or the book which he has written. There was yet another advantage, and one which was not small. There inside K-13, if they could be got at, were four of Fairfields’s experts who would supply that intimate technical knowledge of the craft which the salvors themselves could not possess. Once communication had been established, Fairfields in Glasgow and Fairfields in K-13 would be linked to the chain of salvage, and would lift success from the barely possible up to the almost probable.